Friday, June 19, 2015

My Plan to Expand MLB to 32 Teams: Part 2


What lucky cities would be presented with the new franchises you ask? I'm glad you asked! Again, as I said yesterday this is all extremely hypothetical and for fun so bear with me. I was personally upset when the Montreal Expos were owned by Major League Baseball, disbanded and then became the Washington Nationals so for nostalgia reasons mostly, and because I think the economy around Major League Baseball is a whole lot stronger nowadays and I think the city of Montreal could support it, let's bring back the Montreal Expos. Canada needs another team and frankly could support one easily in my opinion.  It was Montreal or another New York team (homer), maybe around the Buffalo or Syracuse area in a dome, so I went with Montreal to keep from flooding the New York market.

When thinking of the second team I had to do a little research, I didn't really have past performances or nostalgia to go on this time around. I considered Oklahoma City, Norfolk, Austin, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Orlando and finally decided on the obvious choice these days, Cuba. Cuba’s biggest city and capitol, Havana, is a mere 85 miles from the tip of Miami adding at most an extra hours’ worth of traveling for teams in an airplane. Security would be a nightmare at first but in a totally hypothetical world how awesome would it be to see the likes of Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig, Rusney Castillo, Yoan Moncada, Jose Abreu and others head back to their mother land and the country of their birth for a three or four game series a few times a season? I’ll answer that for you, the word awesome does not describe how awesome and intriguing that would be.

It's been nearly 20 years since Major League Baseball expanded and the economy around the sport is better than ever, why not now? We're less than two years away from a new collective bargaining agreement and this would give both sides even more incentive then they already have to keep the players on the field at all costs. It technically makes less contending teams admittedly but it makes things more interesting in my opinion. Sure five or six playoff spots might not be up for grabs on the last week of the season but everything else would be far more interesting including the July 31st trading deadline, free agency, roster alignments, Rule 5 Drafts and the MLB First Year Player’s Draft to name a few.

The biggest hurdle would be the obvious realignment in the divisions and who would go to this newly created division, a division I will call the North Division.

To be continued....

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Sorry for the Capatcha... Blame the Russians :)